RIP CPB

It happened.  What Richard Nixon, Donald Wildmon, Newt Gingrich, and Mick Mulvaney all failed to do in the past, Donald J. Trump did in one fell swoop.  He forced the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to go out of business.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the somewhat makeshift entity that doles out federal funds, suddenly found itself with no funds to dole out after Trump and his henchmen succeeded in zeroing out funding for public broadcasting in retaliation for a perceived liberal bias in PBS's and NPR's news reporting.  That bias must have been a surprise to Margaret Hoover, the great-granddaughter of the thirty-first U.S. President, who currently hosts the right-leaning PBS talk show "The Firing Line," as well as to longtime viewers of PBS's "NewsHour" broadcast, which gets "funding" from such major corporations as BNSF Railway.  (After too much fluff pretending to be news, like stories on hip-hop culture and those stupid "Brief but Spectacular" essays which are neither, I stopped watching the NewsHour altogether, as you already know.) And National Public Radio tends to broadcast talk shows - many of them boring - that have nothing to do with politics of any sort.  But the "liberal bias" myth, unlike the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, endures. 

As far as I'm concerned, good riddance.  I'm glad that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is biting the dust, mainly because public broadcasting has become so unbelievably pretentious, from the miniseries set in the Regency and Victorian eras of nineteenth-century England on PBS to the Sunday-morning folk-music shows on NPR-affiliated stations that always feature Tom Chapin songs, cuts from David Crosby's solo albums, and Joni Mitchell wannabes singing about saving the whales or building more affordable housing - in other words, public broadcasting caters to the tastes of white bourgeois liberals, the same demographic that even bothers to vote on public broadcasting to begin with.  But given PBS's history with airing Lawrence Welk reruns,  John Tesh concerts, and those tiresome, tedious nostalgia concerts - public-broadcasting programming has more in common with Richard Nader than with Ralph Nader - it's a wonder how white bourgeois liberals could continue to believe that public broadcasting in These States was ever anything like the BBC.  The loss of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting pulls that mask off, but the mask was a bandit eye mask that allowed you to still determine the wearer's features.  People who thought public broadcasting was a truly independent alternative to mainstream commercial broadcasting should have seen right through that disguise all along.  Now they have no alternative but to face the truth.

We'll still have public broadcasting in some form, but now more than ever, local stations will have to rely on local funding.  Get ready for longer pledge-drive interruptions during "special" PBS programming like your local station airing the memorial concert for George Harrison for the 674,258th time.  But it's time to admit that public broadcasting in America - made possible by a grant from an oil company - is not, never was, and never will be anything like the BBC.  My observation is not a popular one, and I lost a friend who raises (raised?) money for a local public-television station by pointing this out to her, but let's face it . . .

How come National Public Radio never aired live performances of popular-music acts now considered "classic rock" and allowed them to be put out as records years after (the albums above don't really exist), as BBC Radio has done? 

Yes, it's too bad we don't have anything like the BBC in These States, but as a New York magazine writer once said twenty years ago, deal with it - there are more important battles against reactionaries to fight.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting disbands at the end of September.